Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/50

26 country no less than elsewhere. Moreover, it was against the spirit and letter of the law. I, therefore, deemed it my duty to arrest that audacious and destructive robbery. Not that I had intended to prevent the settler and the miner from taking from the public lands what they needed for their cabins, their fields or their mining shafts; but I deemed it my duty to stop at least the commercial depredations upon the property of the people. And to that end I used my best endeavors and the means at my disposal, scanty as they were.

What was the result? No sooner did my attempts in that direction become known, than I was pelted with telegraphic despatches from the regions most concerned, indignantly inquiring what it meant that an officer of the Government dared to interfere with the legitimate business of the country! Members of Congress came down upon me, some with wrath in their eyes, others pleading in a milder way, but all solemnly protesting against my disturbing their constituents in this peculiar pursuit of happiness. I persevered in the performance of my plain duty. But when I set forth my doings in my annual report and asked Congress for rational forestry legislation, you should have witnessed the sneers at the outlandish notions of this “foreigner” in the Interior Department; notions that, as was said, might do for a picayunish German principality, but were altogether contemptible when applied to this great and free country of ours. By the way, some of the gentlemen who sneered so greatly might learn some lessons from those picayunish German principalities, which would do them much good. I recently revisited my native land and saw again some of the forests I had known in my younger days—forests which in the meantime had yielded to their owners or to the Government large revenues from the timber cut, but were now nevertheless as stately as they had been before,